EatenTheSun:I would play the shiat out of some Micro League Baseball right now.

I spent whole weekends programming in current teams..... Like all 30 (or I guess 26 back then!) and playing the whole season concurrent with the real season going on..... A few times, it was very, very similar

RedPhoenix122:EatenTheSun: I would play the shiat out of some Micro League Baseball right now.

I'll see your Micro League Baseball and raise you Archon.

My buddy used to kick my ass (for real) because of my prowess with that unicorn firing its horn.....

I just can't get around the idea of "what happens to latency when the data you want is at the other end of a spooled tape?" I'm not sure how any filesystem in the world could make that not take at least a couple seconds to retrieve, and for most business applications, latency matters a whole hell of a lot.

Current projections by the trade body Information Storage Industry Consortium show that although hard drives will be able to store 3 terabytes a piece in a decade's time, that still amounts to at least 120,000 drives a year.

I'm guessing they mean per platter or something, right? Otherwise, maybe they should get someone to go check out Newegg.

Rabbid_Squirrel:I just can't get around the idea of "what happens to latency when the data you want is at the other end of a spooled tape?" I'm not sure how any filesystem in the world could make that not take at least a couple seconds to retrieve, and for most business applications, latency matters a whole hell of a lot.

The longest six hours of my life was when I accidentally removed a production directory from a clustered machine and removed all of the web apps that were installed instantly. The other machine in the cluster instantly wiped the files evidently as they were gone from both machines in the blink of an eye. We had to get the backup team involved and it took hours. The guy doing the restore would laugh when another tape mount message would come up and they would have to find someone to go physically search for the tape and then load it into the tape machine. I would cringe because if they couldn't find the tape, I was screwed. They finally got it all restored, but the salt in the wound was that it was from the night before so all of the work deploying code that night was gone. So we started all deployments over. You bet your ass when I got to the same point I didn't make that mistake again. Tapes are for backups and data you don't need instant access to.

the cake is a pie:Current projections by the trade body Information Storage Industry Consortium show that although hard drives will be able to store 3 terabytes a piece in a decade's time, that still amounts to at least 120,000 drives a year.

I'm guessing they mean per platter or something, right? Otherwise, maybe they should get someone to go check out Newegg.

Um, yeah something wrong with that quote. I can buy a 3 TB drive right now, by 2024, it should be at least 128TB, if not 256, according to Moore's law...

o4tuna:Um, yeah something wrong with that quote. I can buy a 3 TB drive right now, by 2024, it should be at least 128TB, if not 256, according to Moore's law...

Hard drives haven't really kept up with Moore's law. Making the data more dense is easy, the problem is the trade off with reliability. And the denser you make the data, the more reliable it needs to be.

You see, way back in the day...RIAA didn't like cassettes and people making mix tapes. So a compromise was reached. When you purchased a blank cassette a portion of the purchase goes to the RIAA....so you could legally make copies to share, give away etc. (not to sell or profit from tho). Because you already paid the RIAA fee in the purchase of the cassette. Link

When RW CDs came out the data people complained about a portion for each RW-CD going to the RIAA. Saying it was just for data only.

It would be interesting to see if this works in real life...DL all the 'shared files' on cassettes (in digital format) which would be technically legal since the RIAA got their dime....and then once in your possession, Upload them to your pod. As long as you bought the cassette and DL directly to Cassette and didn't profit from a re-sell..the RIAA was already paid.

schrodinger:Hard drives haven't really kept up with Moore's law. Making the data more dense is easy, the problem is the trade off with reliability. And the denser you make the data, the more reliable it needs to be.

I wonder how much of that is a lack of demand.Most users won't ever fill up a decent sized laptop drive, to say nothing of multiple large disks.Servers still care more about access time / latency so they're on 10K RPM (Or higher) RAID arrays of various high throughput interfaces where smaller individual disks aren't such a limit in overall storage capacity.

(Desktop) hard drives plowed through 1/2, 3/4 1, 1.5TB sizes, but those have stayed the mainstay affordable sizes for quite a while now. Are we hitting a wall in magnetic storage, or does the expense of 500+GB individual platters not meet the market demand?

I'm mainly just waiting for SSDs to get affordable in a size that can accommodate my Steam Games folder. Moore's law should work well for that, so if I don't buy any games for 4 or 5 years storage should catch up with my current games library.

jfarkinB:Not if you've got the right RAID arrangement, with the right filesystem deployed on it.

IMHO, it still doesn't meet the same level of resiliency as tape. I've seen a drive in an array go bad, only to discover that a second drive had bad blocks during the rebuild, causing the rebuild to fail. And unless your filesystem has some advanced snapshoting features, you can still fark things up by inadvertently deleting files. And even that won't fix this:

I'm pretty sure that's exactly what the article is referring to. The reference to IBM's linear tape file system pretty much seals the deal, which is designed for LTO5. Cool idea, and makes sense for integrating with large tiered SAN arrays. It could potentially take the place of SATA drives in those arrays, where read/write speed isn't critical. The tapes and tape drives aren't cheap, and I'm not quite sure what the specific application would be. You'll still need to wait for tape mounts and people don't like waiting for data.

To sum up: file system on a tape, potentially moving tape backup technology into the quasi-primary storage realm.

I wonder how well it would work out, using the technology from Holographic Versatile Disc (HVD), which can store 6TB on a regular optical disc, in a tape format. Seems like it'd be a good way to cram tons of data into a cartridge.

FTFA:The downside of tapes is that they are slower to access than hard discs because they have to be fetched by a robotic mechanism, inserted in a reader and spooled to the right point. But the Linear Tape File System, which is being developed, expedites this process to make it comparable to disc drives, Eleftheriou says.

Yeah... and it's not like cassette tapes running at high speed will ever jam or start distorting due to heat build-up from the friction. Think back to the Coleco Adam tape drives.